Clive, how about more than one metrical style? These thoughts are based on some remarks by Alan Sullivan, and have been stirring in my mind for several weeks. Finally wrote them out during an insomniac night. Might do for an article.(Don't take any of this too seriously.)
We’re talking about accentual-syllabic meter: not Free-verse. Syllabic verse or accentual meters. We’re talking about Iambic meters: not triple-meters or falling-meters. For ease of discussion, let’s use the Iambic Pentameter…although the same considerations can easily be adapted to any line-length from tri-meter to fourteeners.
Style#1 The Strict Style
Metrical Substitutions: As you’d expect, the strict style is the most restrictive. There is generally only one substitution permitted per line and usually only about one in every three lines. And sustitutions are limited in where they occur.
Reversed feet are most common on the first position, less so in the third position (in ip), perhaps in the 4th and rarely if ever on the second or last foot of a line.
Almost the only extra syllables readily accomodated are the “feminine ending” and more rarely the extra syllable at the beginning of a line.
The only unaccented syllable that can be deleted is the off-beat that initiates an iambic line. Accented syllables are never added or subtracted in verse where line-length is otherwise consistent.
Pyrrhic-spondee pairs are permitted pretty much anywhere in the line…although there might be misgivings about placing a pyrrhus on the second foot.
Rhythmic Variation:
Promoted accents are common in the Strict Style…the regularity of the meter makes it easy. Still, only about one per line, usually inside the line in the second half (after the rhythm’s established), and usually in lines that don’t otherwise contain caesurae, substitutions or end with a high degree of enjambment.
Demoted off-beats are fairly common, but are usually pushed to the beginnings or ends of lines, where they less likely to disrupt the iambic rhythm.
Both promotions and demotions are very clear-cut: promoted accents might be bracketed on one or both sides by suffixes/prefixes; demotions will fall clearly on less important parts of the statement.
Traditionally, caesurae fall in the middle of the line and occur only about once per line— although both strictures have been relaxed in this past century. How many lines contain a caesura is simply up to the poet. Enjambment at line-endings tends to be moderate— but how many lines end in enjambment is again largely up to the poet.
Works of genius have been composed in this style, and it may be the single most common style in the Tradition (although probably only a large minority). It flourished in the 18th Century but has examplars in all periods. It is the style most associated with the current Neo-Formal Revival. It’s the kind of thing they like at Storyline, Eratosphere and most of the formalist magazines.
The strict style is the style most often employed for non-literary purposes (eg. greeting cards and popular song lyrics). It’s the most popular style of poetry for an audience that is not very sophisticated artistically (although dumbed-down Beat-verse is catching up). It may well be the only form of verse well-suited to be taught to pre-adolescent children.
It works supremely well in amusing poetry, it’s well–suited to narrative and discursive poetry (particularly at length). It may be a little too stiff for most dramatic verse but is excellent for libretti. Of course, works of genius have been composed in lyric poetry using this approach, and it strongly supports rhyme. It dominates the composition of sonnets and was Shakespeare’s preferred approach in this form.
The regularity of strict verse is often described as “musical”, but I think “incantatory” might be the better word. Although it’s most commonly associated with straight-forward traditional poetry, because of this chant-like quality, it is well-suited to a certain mystical or Symbolist aesthetics…Modernists, don’t despair!
Two things are commonly said about the Strict Style that are highly debateable— that it’s easy to learn, and that some advantage accrues from learning it first.
Allan Sullivan is apt to say such things, but that’s mostly because he prefers to read this kind of verse and finds it easier to critique.
The Strict Style is…well, strict. What’s easy about that? It is one style choice among others and, if it doesn’t suit your native genius, it will never be easy, and it may not be possible to acquire it.
There is something sorta conceptually normative about the Strict Style, though— it is metrical poetry. It’s easiest to describe the other three styles of metrical verse by constrasting them with the Strict Style.
Style #2 The Lilting Style
Metrical Substitution: The Lilting Style revels in certain kinds of substitutions— principally anapests, but also reversed feet and double-feet when these can generate an “anapesty” rhythm. Sequences of two consecutive unaccented syllables pop up everywhere. That’s the point— to write scannable Iambic verse that sounds as much like anapestic verse as possible. Kinda the best of both worlds, one hopes.
Multiple substitutions per line are permitted, although usually only two extra unaccented syllables per line are allowed (eg. 12 syllables for a pentameter etc.). If you accept a pyrrhic-spondee pair as a substitution, entire lines might be constructed containing no iambs. There are no particular strictures about where substitutions occur, although traditionally substitution on the second foot of a pentameter is considered “sensitive” (apt to disrupt the rhythm).
Feminine endings aren’t especially more likely to occur, (although they may have a certain flavor, see below) because that’s the one case where the extra syllable isn’t “anapesty”.
Rhythmic Variation:
Promoted accents aren’t especially common in the lilting Style— perhaps because the looseness makes them both harder to achieve, and harder to justify.
Demotion on off-beats is very common, for the same reasons it’s common in true anapestic verse.
A special case is the Feminine Ending. The Lilting Style seems to like demotion on that extra syllable…I’m not sure why.
He TRAV-elled On the WHITE horse
Endings like that are very common in the Lilting Style, and this is the infamous “abuse of the feminine ending” in Shakespeare and the Jacobeans, so deplored by 18th-Century and Victorian critics.
Caesurae are very common in the Lilting Style, as a device to “smuggle in” the extra syllable, or “spring” a reversed foot smoothly. But the flavor isn’t choppy— it flows.
But enjambment is fairly modest. After all, the line-lengths are apt to be irregular, and some kind of control is needed.
The Lilting Style became common in late Elizabethian and Jacobean dramatic verse, and Shakespeare’s late Blank Verse tends in this direction. It was revived by the Romantics and fought with the Strict Style for the soul of Victorian Poetry. It persists in the modern era, and was the preferred style of Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas, Donald Justice and many others. Absent rhyme, it can sound sorta like free-verse.
The genius of the Lilting Style is found in dramatic verse, and anything that requires dialogue…it’s close to our speech-rhythm. It is too slack for Light Verse. It works reasonably well in narrative and discursive poetry, and it lends itself to a kind of breathless, fast-paced lyric. It’s only so-so with rhyme, because of the irregular line-lengths. It is the principal cause of bad sonnets.
For many, this style is easy to learn. Like anything, when it’s well-done, it’s easy to like. If you’re prone to spontaneously compose anapestic verse, this might be your preferred style in composing iambic verse. Who knows?
The Lilting Style lends itself to all kinds of vice…but you could say that about anything.
The remaining two styles can be described more briefly.
Style #3 The Metaphysical Style
So-called because it flourished in a brief period of tense religious and political conflict in English literary history— the first half of the 17th Century. It’s associated with John Milton, John Donne and George Herbert. It reflects the over-strained, crabbed and gloomy sensibility shared by those guys. (Curiously, two protogees of Milton— Andrew Marvell and John Dryden— were mostly unaffected). It has become widely admired again in modern times.
Rhythmically, Metaphysicals love demoted off-beats and have almost no recourse to Promoted accents— there are almost no low-stress syllables to promote, anyway. Metaphysicals will employ weird locutions to stuff their lines with long sequences of syllables of high-dynamic stress.
Deleting unaccented syllables almost anywhere in the line can be done-- producing "clipped" and "broken-backed" pentameters-- and it's even possible to "smuggle in" an extra stress to make a weird "broken-backed hexameter". Philip Larkin was fond of these effects.
Fierce enjambment is the rule along with frequent and off-center caesurae. The preferred metrical substitutions are reversed feet and pyrrhic-spondee pairs, although anapests also occur whenever they might serve to make the line more “choppy”. More than one trochee and/or double-iamb per line is almost normal, and rarely will you encounter a purely iambic line. Metaphysicals construct their lines out of concrete and barbed wire— a poem by Robert Lowell could stop a tank!
Although Milton wrote Paradise Lost, because this style was only briefly popular before modern times, there are few examples of narrative, dramatic or discursive poetry in this approach…but it’s hard to believe it lends itself to any of these uses.
The true home of the Metaphysical Style is a certain kind of lyric, filled with riddling “meanings”, bizarre locutions and counter-intuitive and unpleasant imagery.
All this may seem kinda modern, but it’s been with us all along. Metaphsical poetry may be a sort of throw-back to god-awful Beowulf, and the sensibility can be detected in Jonathan Swift and Thomas Hardy. (Anybody who was a real prick seems to have an affinity for this approach.) Hopkins is a hero to these guys.
It became extremely popular with the advent of the 50’s formalists— especially Robert Lowell, but to some degree or another also Richard Wilbur, Howard Nemerov and Anthony Hecht. John Donne was the darling of English departments from the 50’s thru the 70’s, and I can recall not really liking Donne’s poetry, but thinking I should. (I’ve since liberated myself.)
If you haven’t guessed, I don’t really care for this style of poetry, so I’m not sure how I can recommend it to anyone. I suspect this syle is easy to affect— I find myself lapsing into something like it whenever I unwisely follow anyone’s advise to “enjamb more!”.
It can be done well. I’d guess some of Seamus Heaney’s sonnets are in this vein. Although Dana Gioia once called it stress-heavy syrup, his own poetry seems like it might be moving in this direction.
Last, and perhaps least, is the Subdued Style.
Style #4 The Subdued Style
This is a style designed to make scannable, metrically regular poetry sound less…metrical. It’s hard to think of any pre-modern examples, since this would have seemed like a curious goal before the advent of free-verse.
The way you do it is to write metriccally regular verse…extremely regular. Substitutions are even less common generally in this style than in the Strict Style. The art is in the sources of rhythmic variation, which are systematically played off against the underlying meter.
Some examples:
He filled a glass with cold gin and vermouth
Where is the third stress in this tetrameter? On “gin”, making a reversed foot? Or “and”, making a promoted accent? Either reading is reasonable, and something between the two is perhaps the most natural. Robert Mesey calls this a “reverse iamb”, and it’s a sort of ambiguity achieved by placing a possible demotion in front of a possible promotion. The accent “hovers”. (And you could also read this as two iambs followed by two anapests.)
Another ambiguity (this time, involving a substitution):
And leave, as she left, with no good-byes
There is an anapest here— but where?
And LEAVE, as she LEFT, with NO good-BYES.
or,
And LEAVE, as SHE left, with NO good-BYES.
Again, either reading is reasonable.
Riddle a poem with a lot of these ambiguities, employ no rhyme or off-rhyme, and at least a modest degree of enjambment and creative use of caesurae, and you can create a poem whose surface will feel Free-Verse/Prose/ Syllabic, but with some of the “authority” of the underlying metrical patterning.
For a certain theme or tone this might be spot-on…and a lot more likely to be received in mainstream lit. jounals.
Well, each of us must wrestle with the devil.
[This message has been edited by MacArthur (edited January 21, 2002).]
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